Sunday, December 23, 2012

Second Amendment solutions

To be clear, I support gun rights for responsible owners. I know many of them intimately. But this happened all across America in the week after the Newtown massacre. At gun shows. Where not everyone does a background check.

More than 200 people lined up at each of three entrances on Saturday morning to pay the $8 entrance fee to the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth, which has an exhibit hall spanning 25 acres. They crowded the aisles of the show and stood two-deep at booths for assault weapons and ammunition clips.

At all three shows the attendees were overwhelmingly white men, with some women and very few ethnic minorities.

These are people who honestly believe without a shadow of doubt they are right -- both morally and intellectually -- and everyone else is either wrong, evil, or both.

Bob Hofmeister, whose wife owns Xtreme Sports, a gun dealer with a table at the Kansas City show, said the business sold 15 to 20 AR-15s in the past week.

"Some of these people just want to show their rights to own guns," Hofmeister said.

Because freedom, and nothing quite says public safety like tens of thousands of paranoid gun hoarders rushing out to panic buy semi-automatic weapons and stockpile high capacity ammo clips.